USUL AND MAKASID

Today, we can talk about a crisis of meaning that humanity is experiencing on a global scale. This meaning crisis led to a moral crisis as well. The biggest reason for this moral crisis is the debate about value that makes a behavior moral and the source of this value or values. Losing the hierarchy of values brought about mistakes as great as losing the values itself. More serious than this is the displacement of values and that good is considered bad and bad is considered good and that the replacement of ugly and beautiful, helpful and harmful, right and superstitious. A bigger mistake than this is when the deterioration begins to have a religious nature and us trying to find support from religion for the immoral behavior or the religionization of immorality. In other words, it is the misunderstanding of the religion, which is sent to us to convey good morality, in a way that will support our immoral behavior. The isolation of fiqh from morality and oversimplifying worship from moral intentions has been the biggest calamity for the community of believers.

Thanks to modern communication technologies, the state of our world, where knowledge is transformed into pure information and the information turned into the entertainment sector and where informatic ignorance and pollution are increasingly dominant, requires us to think about the moral dimension of knowledge and the relation between knowledge and human. Being more knowledgeable does not mean to be more moral, more virtuous and more accurate. Interestingly, our age, witnessing the surprising and limitless advances of the mind, has seen the most serious examples of abuse of a blessing like mind, and it has brought war and terror to humanity instead of peace. In the past century, developments in science and technology have served to wars and terrorism but not to peace. The ambition for consumption, the demand for luxury, selfishness, and greed has reached unprecedented levels. Therefore, we have to think again. Could knowledge produced without morals and science developed without ethics promise hope and peace to humanity?

Considerably, these are not only for Western and secular knowledge but also for religious knowledge whose existence stems from moral reasons. Nowadays, material opportunities for religious knowledge have improved significantly compared to the past. Although educated people, publications and technical opportunities have increased significantly, it is a highly controversial issue that in which levels the developments in knowledge have turned into morality and responsibility in individual and social life.

Every religious judgment has one jurisprudent (related to fiqh) and one moral aspect. The fiqh aspect organizes the outer world of the human, and the moral aspect organizes the inner world. According to methodology science, the fiqh aspect of religious judgments is based on the reasoning (sebebi illet), and the moral aspect depends on the causa finalis (gai illet). Morality is the purpose, and fiqh is the cause. The purpose does not realize without the cause. If the purpose vanishes, the cause does not make any sense.

Being religious means being ethical. Morality includes all of human behavior, not some of it. If the human is moral, he is human. If a Muslim is moral, he is Muslim. Alive authentic culture and high civilization are nothing but moral. Wisdom, knowledge, and deeds are also included in this morality.

Unfortunately, we do not have a moral method as we have a fiqh method. Therefore, it is far from any explanation that we need a method of morality that will re-establish the system and hierarchy of values that make a behavior moral.